Zeno's Paradox
September 19, 2003 - How NOT to Complain About Bugs

I checked the Books page at MacUpdate to get an idea of the total number of downloads that had gone through that conduit. I noticed that a user posted an issue with the newest version, 1.1: "DELETED MY ROM FILE!" Now, I don't know who this person is, nor have they attempted to contact me about the bug. I find this really irritating...

This behavior is irritating for a variety of reasons. First of all, there is an issue when upgrading Books from older versions that encoded book information using the MacRoman encoding. For some reason, it's ok to encode non-ASCII characters in MacRoman and spit out XML files with that encoding, but the MacOS X XML parser (I'm saving my rant on the OS X XML functionality for another day.) will not parse a MacRoman XML file with non-ASCII characters. It will parse one with only ASCII characters, but not a mixed one. (Note that I'm using ASCII liberally here. I'm not referring to the encoding, but the set of characters present in that encoding.)

So, in Books 1.0.1, I changed all the default encodings from MacRoman to Unicode UTF-16 to future-proof the application against similar issues in the future. However, there is still issues with people upgrading from MacRoman versions of the application to Unicode. The simplest fix is to take your ~/Library/Books/books.xml file and save it with TextEdit with a UTF-16 encoding. I have also provided more explicit instructions with the 1.1 download image. (It's an RTF called Upgrading.rtf.) Overall, I feel that I have the issue pretty much solved. In prior versions, I would get a lot of e-mail about bugs and such -- note the rapid pace of the beta releases and how quickly 1.0.1 came out after 1.0. I realize that there will be some issues, and I would like to fix them for my users. So far (2003-09-19 09:18:00), the only problem that has been reported is the slowness of saving large collections (~1500) and I have managed to get a fix out to the guy who reported it and it's been rolled into the development version pending finding other unknown bugs to fix. I have not received a single e-mail about the MacRoman issue.

So getting back to the complaining... If the guy mentioned above has a legitimate bug, he should post it to the VersionTracker and MacUpdate pages, but he should also e-mail me about the problem. I can't fix the bug unless I know how it's happening, and I can't know how it's happening unless I get an e-mail or other form of correspondence. I'm sure that most users who have sent me bugs will attest to the fact that I'll likely have your issue solved within 24 hours of receiving notice. So, if you're a user and you have a bug -- REPORT THE DAMN THING! My e-mail address for these matters is books@aetherial.net.

[Update] The comment is now gone. Must have been a troll. I should also state that the vast vast majority of the people that use Books has been a model community in helping me find problems and correct them. It's the annoying few that make me this irritated.

Posted by br284 at 09:24 AM

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